News (Page 815)

An Asteroid was Discovered Just Hours Before it Exploded over Africa On Saturday, June 2nd, skywatchers in Botswana reported an extremely bright fireball in the sky. A 2-meter-sized spacerock smashed into the atmosphere going 17 kilometers per second, disintegrated high in the atmosphere, and briefly lit up the landscape. BREAKING NEWS!! ??An #asteroid just hit Earth’s atmosphere, sparking a fireball over the southern African nation of Botswana at 12:44 p.m. EDT while hurtling down at a whopping 38,000 mph ? That’s 10 miles every second, but don’t worry, it burned up in the atmosphere (phew) pic.twitter.com/T5gGR1OHJN — Link Institute (@LinkObservatory) June 5, 2018 This kindRead More →

Okay, Last Year’s Kilonova Did Probably Create a Black Hole In August of 2017, another major breakthrough occurred when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected waves that were believed to be caused by a neutron star merger. Shortly thereafter, scientists at LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were able to determine where in the sky this event (known as a kilonova) occurred. This source, known as GW170817/GRB, has been the target of many follow-up surveys since it was believed that the merge could have led to the formation of a black hole. According to a new study by a team thatRead More →

Pluto has “Sand Dunes”, but Instead of Sand, it’s Grains of Frozen Methane In July of 2015, the New Horizons mission made history when it conducted the first flyby in history of Pluto. In the course of conducting its flyby, the probe gathered volumes of data about Pluto’s surface, composition, atmosphere and system of moons. It also provided breathtaking images of Pluto’s “heart”, its frozen plains, mountain chains, and it’s mysterious “bladed terrain”. These strange features showed people for the first time how radically different the surface of Pluto is from Earth and the other planets of the inner Solar System. But strangely, they alsoRead More →

Language in the Cosmos I: Is Universal Grammar Really Universal? The METI Symposium The symposium How could you devise a message for intelligent creatures from another planet? They wouldn’t know any human language. Their ‘speech’ might be as different from ours as the eerie cries of whales or the twinkling lights of fireflies. Their cultural and scientific history would have followed its own path. Their minds might not even work like ours. Would the deep structure of language, its so called ‘universal grammar’ be the same for aliens as for us? A group of linguists and other scientists gathered on May 26 to discuss theRead More →

Engineers Propose a Rocket that Consumes Itself as it Flies to Space When it comes to the new era of space exploration, one of the primary focuses has been on cutting costs. By reducing the costs associated with individual launches, space agencies and private aerospace companies will not only be able to commercialize Low Earth-Orbit (LEO), but also mount far more in the way of exploration missions and maybe even colonize space. Several methods have been proposed so far for reducing launch costs, which include reusable rockets and single-stage-to-orbit rockets. However, a team of engineers from the University of Glasgow and the Ukraine recently proposedRead More →

Clearly a Fan. Jeff Bezos Himself Announced that Amazon was Picking up The Expanse At Comic-Con 2015, fans of space opera and science fiction were treated to their first glimpse of The Expanse, the miniseries adaptation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s novels. Needless to say, the reaction was magnificent, and is perhaps best up by IO9’s Lauren Davis, who penned a review of the trailer titled, “The Expanse Is the Show We’ve Been Wanting Since Battlestar Galactica. It was therefore a bit of a blow when recently, the Syfy network announced that the third season (which is currently airing) would be the show’s last. ReactionRead More →